Every day this summer, I’ve compulsively watched at least one video by the content creator Sam Todd, whose job, I suppose, is influencing teens to be hyperconsumerist. She is on an endless vacation across the world, seemingly with the goal of collecting every city’s exclusive Pandora charm; she knows, intimately, how much rare Labubus go for in Singapore, London, and Vietnam—because she’s spent hundreds on them in each destination—and is waging what she describes as a “war” against Labubu resellers, which she is very clearly losing.
When I listen to Pittsburgh four-piece forty winks’ almighty, intense, totally unhinged garage-pop banger “commie bf,” which I have also done every day this summer, and Cilia Catello sings that “everyone and everything makes my ears ring,” it’s Todd and her army of dangling “purse pals” that flash into my brain, along with pictures of genocide, my weird and evil landlord, J.K. Rowling, Alex Warren, the AI videos I keep falling for, and the anti-microplastics laundry bag I was told to buy, only to find that it’s made of polyester. “Commie bf” is is instantly one of those all-time rock songs because it’s fiendishly catchy and it starts at 100 percent intensity and ends somewhere around 175 percent, but also because forty winks’ mixture of deadpan nihilism, radio rock riffs, and wits-end head voice hits the exact right frequency to tune out all the stupid annoying bullshit for two minutes and 20 seconds.
“Commie bf” is the best song on Love Is a Dog From Hell, forty winks’ short but effective debut EP, which pulverizes punk, garage, and indie rock into a caustic, addictive goop. The expectations set by each track are immediately toppled by its successor; opener “liadfh” is a pixelated nu-shoegaze dirge not dissimilar to much of the TikTok rock that proliferates on Spotify, but it’s immediately followed by “commie bf,” which sounds like Olivia Rodrigo sitting in with Germs. Then comes “Spurs,” a dreamy love song (“Your lips, on mine, just when I say goodbye,” sings Conner McGee) that makes room for a few seconds of assaultive black metal, and ends with a blistering, almost laughably capital-R Rock solo.
These songs get off on shock value, but forty winks have a knack for organised chaos: “Spurs” barrels forward in such a way that by the time you get to said black metal interlude, Colin Klink’s halting drums have already warned you that something bad is about to happen; “noise” counterbalances its cardiac-arrest rhythms with Catello’s surging hooks. Like “commie bf,” it’s an opaque song whose snotty rebellion originates entirely in Catello’s deliciously snarky delivery: “I’ve got noise/In my head/What is so important about walking aimless?” she sings, with such petulant verve that it’s clear you don’t want to be on the receiving end. It’s a venomous song—but in times like these, forty winks’ punishing math-punk feels like an antidote.
